Marie louise of austria biography of martin

Childhood in Austria

Marie-Louise de Habsburg-Lorraine was born on 12 December, , in Vienna. Her parents, Francis II, who succeeded his father, Leopold II, as Holy Roman Emperor on 1 March, , and Maria Theresa of Naples were both related to Marie-Antoinette.

Raised by her various governesses, she had a bourgeois but happy upbringing despite the difficulties imposed upon her after her family&#;s exile in This experience developed into a distinct aversion to France and a loathing of the one known as the &#;Corsican ogre&#;.

She later admitted to Ménéval that she grew up &#;if not in hating [him], then at least in an environment hardly favourable to the man who had on numerous occasions brought the House of Habsburg to within a hair&#;s breadth of destruction, and who had forced her family to flee the capital and to wander from town to town in confusion and dismay.&#;(1)

Build-up to the imperial marriage

In , Marie-Louise, then aged eighteen, learned of rum